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Barbara Caine, Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair. Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2003. Pp. 294. $45.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 110, Issue 5, December 2005, Pages 1597–1598, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.110.5.1597
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Extract
Based as it is on the detailed reconstruction of the families living in two class estates (comprising twelve streets), this book provides an engaging and very detailed picture of middle-class life in Glasgow in the second half of the nineteenth century. It stresses the economic and occupational diversity in a class in which the amount left in wills varied staggeringly between the ship owner who left £371,000 and the clothier, doctor, or “wright and builder,” each of whom left less than £1,400. Its detailed reconstitution of family life also produces a clear and unexpected picture of how middle-class families were made up, with a relatively small number of male headed nuclear family units (half of the households being considered in 1851 and just over a third in 1891). In place of this familial bourgeois family, one has a picture in which there are far more female headed households than one might have expected (around twelve percent in 1851 and twenty-one percent forty years later). Following the patterns established by Stephen Ruggles and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair point to the prevalence of extended families in this period and stress that, while extended families may have been as common among the middle as the working classes, the actual constitution of extended families was clearly affected by class. Thus the extended network found in middle-class families consisted of siblings rather more often than of aged parents, and the siblings most often found in these extended families were unmarried sisters.
